Why so many miserable babies with Brain Damage, Fits, Mental Retardation?
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It is horrifying, depressing, frustrating and worrying to see, in my (a Neuro(Brainy!)surgeon, a "nut cracker"
as the nick name goes)) consulting room day in and day out, scores of miserable, harried parents bringing to me
their unfortunate kids in stinking diapers / snuggies with ammoniacal dermatitis at their bottoms, drooling
saliva, facial contortions, writhing / twisting limbs, doubly (urinary and faecal) incontinent, facial and limbs
asymmetries and deformities, letting out horrifying sounds and throwing fits of various (hundreds of) types on and
off and getting, in the bargain, their bodies hurt visibly (fore-head bumps, bitten tongues and broken teeth and
even dislocated joints (shoulders mostly) and broken bones too and, more important, unseen by us, getting their
brains hurt more and more, leading to more and more scarification / gliosis / sclerosis in their brains (heard of
medial temporal sclerosis damaging the hippocampi, the (sea-horse - shaped) memory chips in human brains) which trigger
off more and more fits / seizures / convulsions - and further brain damage - a veritable vicious cycle indeed.
They come to me with the misbegotten hope that I can make normal kids out of those highly damaged kids (I know
of at least one well-placed (Highly dishonest, of course) neurosurgeon who demanded (and almost got) from a real
estate agent a fee of one million Indian Rupees against his (false) promise of curing his highly damaged baby boy
of this type to the level where he can go to a normal school, all in a month (? By a brain / head transplant, not
yet become but hoped to become a reality in the near future)!
I usually admit to such parents I need to be a magician or god of some kind to fulfill their hopes!
But then Who is to be blamed for all this ( To quote a song from Bollywood's Amar Prem movie By the late
Superstar Rajesh Khanna - "Yeh Hissa Aur Kisee ka!(Read "This is a story (part) of somebody else!")?
Is it God, Almighty, Omnipresent, Omniscient, who is said to have made man in his own image? (Heard of a God
and a man who met halfway between the earth and heavens (? hell)and embraced each other shouting "Oh! My Maker!"
(Don't ask me whether God made man or man made god(s)! It is a chicken or egg first story, ain't it?).
Is it the parents, mothers in particular, and their families? Young and ignorant parents who, seeing that they
don't have enough funds / proper status yet to support a baby, start a process of abortion but, after being
reprimanded by their senior relatives for their attempted sin against an unborn, continue with the pregnancy only
to get a damaged baby at the end! Is it the Young husbands, sex-thirsty and stupid, who infect the unborn baby in
their wive's wombs by forcing sex on their pregnant wives (marital rape, as it is called today, and said to be
very common in India today!). Is it the foolish young mothers who take harmful medicines (like the notorious
Thalidomide world over and Pipmal in Tamil Nadu) to stop vomiting (hyperemesis gravidarum) etc., starve, over-eat,
indulge in high profile athletics, suffer accidental fals, get kicked by (drunken) husbands, smoke, drink alcohol,
take addictive narcotics, work with high radiation colour monitors (TV / Computer) and use the ubiquitous
(necessary evil?) cell (mobile) phones, held against their ears, going out in the open on days of Full Moon
(Romantic and irresistible), New Moon and eclipses when unfiltered (highly fetal - injurious (teratogenic) and
even cancerogenic) radiation from the skies!) while pregnant or eat / drink such radiated food / water / drinks
etc., etc., etc.,?
Is it the obstetricians - qualified and unqualified (quacks / well-meaning grannies included and mid-wives)
and highly qualified and experienced medical personnel, mostly females (some men too!) (all who had taken, at the
time of their graduation into medicine the well-known but the oft-forgotten / mostly dis-obeyed Hippocratic oath
(Poor Hippocrates must be turning (nay, Spinning superfast) in his grave!), often highly egoistic, obsessive and
money-mongering, who help(!) billions of human samples come into this world out of their mothers' wombs day in and
day out from the day when human kind started on this earth?
Is it the societies / governments who allow pollution of air and water, contamination of food, proliferation
of spurious meds, drugs etc., reaching pregnant mothers or put pregnant or to-be-pregnant women into the radiation
rich skies and space in the name of scientific research to find new dwellings for mankind now getting suffocted on
the over-populated (Bursting) earth?
Most certainly, all of you would agree, it is not the fault of those poor babies!!
Follow me if you are knowledge-thirsty and not chicken-hearted!